The Church of the Future Must Be Monastic
Modern technology has allowed for a remarkable change in our working habits. In the UK, over 45% of the population now works from home or remotely in part or in full. A special moment has arisen in which many of us can choose what kind of life we want to live, and then order our income-earning around that way of life rather than ordering our way of life around an office to which we must daily travel. This allows for a new opportunity in ‘Benedict Option’ living.
I am aware of several parishes where the traditional Latin Mass is offered, despite Rome’s current official campaign against it. Many families have moved to the surrounding areas of those parishes and now home-educate their children together. Much of this has been made possible by recent changes in working habits and the proliferation of new communication technologies. The families of these church communities are living in something like a new Benedictine arrangement, but it’s the ‘new’ part of it that’s the problem, for they do not have a stable monastic community around which to establish their lives. It can all be swept away at any moment. And I know of at least one community where what has taken years to establish was thrown into disarray and destabilised in just a few months due to power-struggles between bickering clergy. This is the kind of thing that happens when your Christian life does not subsist in an arrangement that was established for the centuries.
The Orthodox faithful are at a certain advantage in this regard. In their ecclesial communion, monasticism maintained its proper, privileged place. Thus, Orthodox faithful routinely enjoy the stability of liturgical and spiritual life that has all but vanished among Latin Christians. The Orthodox also kept their ancient liturgy, and they didn’t adopt the pitiful managerialism under which the Roman Church now toils. Of course, they have other instabilities and problems, very serious problems, including their weakening of the indissolubility of marriage, their perennial caesaropapism, and the recent Constantinople-Moscow schism that has divided the Orthodox union, to name just a few.
My own view, for what it is worth, is that the respective problems of Eastern and Western Christianity will never be resolved while—in disobedience to Jesus Christ’s express prayer to the Father (John 17:22)—the apostolic Church persists as a body halved by enmity and obstinacy. Of course, such reunification won’t happen anytime soon, now that Pope Francis has successfully set ecumenical relations back at least about five centuries. With Traditionis Custodes, the pope demonstrated that he can and will suppress an apostolic rite of the Church if he feels like it. Hence, as an Orthodox theologian recently explained to me, Orthodox Christians would be mad to entertain communion with Rome and thereby put their beloved liturgy at risk of being trampled by a half-educated gangster from the Andes or one of his successors.
Indeed, the Orthodox will likely never entertain the prospect of reunification with us Latins until Pope Francis has been personally and publicly condemned by a future pope, and there is also some explicit declaration that papal power cannot be exercised for the destruction of that which it exists to protect (it’s astonishing that that even needs saying.) And while I think that—if the Lord does not come in majesty beforehand—such a condemnation and doctrinal clarification probably will eventually take place (given that the alternative is the utter implosion of the Church under the weight of the monstrosity which the papacy has grown into), it likely won’t happen any time soon.
Moreover, the reunification of East and West will require the consumption of so much humble pie on both sides that, from what I can tell, the self-satisfied moderns who currently occupy the Church’s higher offices simply do not have the appetite. In turn, when it comes to reunification of East and West, I will continue to pray for it, but I’m not going to hold my breath. As I say, though, I will pray for it, because it must happen, for I fear that the western Church will never rediscover its greatest treasure, namely its monastic charism, and so free itself from the yoke of clericalism, if it does not heal itself and become with the Orthodox one Church sacramentally and canonically.
The reason it is so pressing that the Church undergoes a rediscovery of its monastic life is because, in the coming age, I think it is by this rediscovery that it will survive. And this brings me back to The Benedict Option. You see, I think we should accept Dreher’s proposal, acknowledging that Christians need to be in the world but not of it, an imperative that is paramount in an age such as ours. But I want to suggest that we take that proposal a little more literally: we do not simply need to be inspired by the story of St. Benedict and the Order he founded; we need an actual revival of real monasticism in the West. We need literal monasteries. And those called to consecrated life ought to be founding priories and monasteries in cheap places—in Britain, that would mean places like Carmarthenshire, Country Durham, and Dumfriesshire—where the faithful can buy land close by, home educate their children together, and regularly have access to the ancient liturgy which is their birthright (beyond which the Church is rapidly dying anyway). Bishops should be supporting such initiatives, even—fancy that—initiating them.
As things stand, however, were such initiatives to appear, the bishops would likely move in to destroy them. Some years ago, a not dissimilar initiative appeared in Glastonbury. A small group of Benedictines established themselves where once stood Romano-Britain’s Christian capital. The Bishop of Clifton, in whose diocese they were, did not much like the monks’ preference for the ancient Roman Rite liturgy, and he took full advantage of Pope Francis’s dislike of this liturgy to make any future for the Glastonbury monks impossible. They were forced to find refuge in France, where they now continue their life in the countryside of the Vendée.
The desire to maintain the post-Conciliar concordat with the unconverted world and its ideology of liberal progressivism, the inflated managerial power of the episcopacy, and the lack of lay temporal power to keep episcopal toerags in check, has coalesced to create an episcopal class who will seek out and destroy the slightest sign of life in the Church. This problem will not be changed until, with the rejection of the centralisation that it has undergone, episcopal and papal power is reduced to what it ought to be: the authority to teach the Catholic Faith, sanctify the faithful with blessings and sacraments, and govern the Church in accordance with subsidiarity.
As noted, 45% of the UK population now work remotely, wholly or in part, and the statistics are probably similar for other European countries. There is therefore a chance for people to gather around monastic settlements, and thereby to begin a monastic-based re-evangelisation. Such re-evangelisation would not be based on the quick fix of some new catechetical programme, but on the slow and deliberate capture of a part of this world, rendering it pleasing to God. From a very similar initiative, the glories of the high medieval period—with all its cathedrals and universities—emerged out of the dark ages of the Great Migration period. The still practising remnant in many places across the world is trying to build a counterfeit of what the Church once offered as the basic foundation for a stable Christian society. They are gathering, buying property near to one another, and home-educating their children together. But it is always unstable. It’s time to re-establish that for real, with real monasteries, with real monks, who take real vows of stability.
Some may say that those times are not our times, and hence we need something ‘new’ and ‘very different.’ I say that our times are much more like the dark ages than many realise, which of course is the assumption underpinning Dreher’s Benedict Option. Back then, as Europe was beginning to settle, the Cistercian Order was founded at Citeaux in France by a small group of Benedictines who wanted to live the Holy Rule more faithfully. For years, though, they struggled to recruit people to their monastery. Then, one day, a young nobleman called Bernard arrived at the Abbey in Citeaux with a whole entourage of family members whom he’d convinced to join him in an attempt, he said, to escape hell. Soon others joined him—his own father, his extended family, his friends—all becoming monks at Citeaux or nuns elsewhere. Under the inspiration of St. Bernard and his followers, the Cistercian reform quickly spread across the whole of Europe and transformed the religious climate of the continent. Behold, it only takes one man in poor health and a few companions, and God can set the whole world ablaze. We must never underestimate how much God can ignite with just the tiniest ember.
The wonderful writer Paul Kingsnorth has opined that St. Benedict was “the man whose rule was designed to tame” monasticism and “to bring the cave Christians into line.” The Benedictine charism, Kingsnorth thinks, institutionalised and rendered “too comfortable” the hitherto wild way of life lived by Christian monks, exemplified by the Irish saints in Kingsnorth’s romantic account of Celtic Christianity. In reality, however, the Celts soon adopted the Benedictine Rule—with the Cistercian reform in particular thriving in Ireland—largely because the Benedictine charism institutionalised monasticism in the best possible sense. It sacralised the landscape and permeated the quotidian with the sacred, ultimately sacralising the secular all the way down. The Benedictine Order successfully created a stable Christian social order that persisted through dizzying civilisational flux, and by so doing allowed the transformative mystical life proper to Christianity to be not merely the spirituality of an elite few, but something accessible to many, many people—from peasant farmers to monarchs.
Today, in the entirely secularised West, there is no shortage of people longing for a public, ‘institutionalised’ expression of religiosity. The saddest and most chaotic expressions are found in ritualistic wokery, from Gay Pride to Extinction Rebellion; more edifying examples are found among the flocks of dreadlocked westerners who travel to Indian ashrams each year. The antithesis of the liberal privatisation of religion is the Benedictine consecration of the landscape and its seasons, in which all nature is assumed into the liturgical rhythm of the Church. And anyone who thinks that the Benedictine charism is ‘tame’ has not only ignored the many Benedictine missionaries who wandered into unknown lands to contend with barbarians, often unto martyrdom, but needs also to study the near-psychoactive meditations of the Sibyl of the Rhine, Abbess Hildegard von Bingen, or read Abbot Johannes Trithemius’ practical angelology of incubatory spellcasting. If it’s untamed, ‘weird Christianity’ that appeals to Westerners today, then the Benedictines were already there centuries ago.
Over the course of this three-part essay, I have been trying to make one very simple point, and make it continuously in different ways. The point is that, even if the diagnosis of MacIntyre is correct—and I don’t doubt the diagnosis—perhaps we do not need a new and very different St. Benedict. Maybe we need an old and very similar St. Benedict. We need monasteries. We need men and women consecrated to God, to vow to be obedient to their rule, convert their habits from those of modernity to those of grace, and stay put in the place in which they are. In short, we need nothing novel, fresh, innovative, or anything at all consonant with such unpleasant adjectives. We need old-fashioned, traditional Benedictines, and we need them everywhere. Without a stable Christian life, there is no Christian living. That is how the Church of the future will survive the looming dark ages, just as it survived the last dark ages: by the daily prayer and labour of the sons and daughters of St. Benedict.
